


Beyond the Western World

by arrogantemu



Series: The Splintered Light [3]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Canon Temporary Character Death, Finrod and Curufin build a treehouse, Gen, Post-Mandos, Reconciliation, Reference to Torture, Responsibility, Very Long Conversations, aman - Freeform, reference to being eaten by wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 09:25:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6652252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arrogantemu/pseuds/arrogantemu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Come into the light,” he said slowly.</p><p>“You don’t need it to see me.” The voice was so familiar, so unbearably familiar.</p><p>“Nonetheless.”</p><p>After a moment there was motion among the trees, and the firelight fell on the figure of a solitary man, his feet bare and his hair unbound, wrapped in plain grey.  Finrod didn’t rise to greet him, but lifted his head and looked him up and down: the slender frame, the tension in his bearing, the features whose fineness bordered on delicacy.</p><p>“Curufinwë Atarinkë,” he said at last, giving each syllable of the name its full weight. “You look awful.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beyond the Western World

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from a line in the Lay of Leithian, where Finrod is engaging in his song contest against Sauron.
> 
> This fic is a coda, of sorts, to [These Gifts That You Have Given Me](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4781201/chapters/10937615), although it is by no means necessary to have read that before reading this.
> 
> My take on the events of Tol Sirion was strongly influenced by the wrenching works of [PhilosopherAtLarge](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3746291/chapters/8311265); their Finrod remains one of the finest I have ever read. 
> 
> Thanks to my perfect beta reader, [ Sumeria](http://sumeriasmith.tumblr.com). I will keep writing fic as long as I can sit at your feet and have you straighten out my tenses!
> 
> And thanks to WolffyLuna for [fanart of Finrod and his (tasteful?) tattoo!](http://wolffyluna.tumblr.com/post/171654293954/its-f-f-f-finrod-i-was-reading-thearrogantemus)

Beneath the trees in Eldamar, Finrod Felagund paused in his quiet song, set down his tools, and waited for the presence that moved in the dark to show itself. He had kindled a small fire in the center of the hollow, and as it burned low something seemed to be drawn to it. Here in the great forests of western Valinor, the pathless woods were trodden by strange creatures, and even now as the ages circled, the tracker-sages had not named them all.

It was, he decided after a moment, not a beast; though he did sense something like hunger. No beast carried such a tangle of complexity in its will and motions. There were others that might walk these woods: one of Nessa’s servants in bodily form, perhaps, or one of the Avarin Returned from their hidden settlements deep in the ancient forests. He had not believed himself trespassing when he had selected this grove as his building site, but, as he was always the first to admit, the world was full of things that he had yet to discover.

It drew closer. It might be injured, whatever it was – the movement was irregular, the spirit driving it unstable. There was something familiar about it too, a faint but sharp suggestion: _you know me._ Finrod searched the vast reaches of his memory for when he might have felt a like presence before, for what it reminded him of –

Recognition broke on him slowly, so slowly that at first he might have believed it a scrap of an old song come by chance into his mind. He seemed to have come unstuck in time: the stars that wheeled overhead might have been the bright constellations of Beleriand, the stars glimpsed through the silver-golden twilight at the Mingling of the Lights in a younger world, the lights of memory as he had conjured them for his people in that place beneath the earth where there were no stars –

Emotions without name, or whose names contradicted each other, surged through him. He wanted to seat himself beneath the tree as if on a throne, cold and stern and kingly, to spring up fully alert and ready to fight, to rush off into the darkness and throw his arms around the visitor, freely shedding the tears that were already welling in his eyes.

He did none of those things. Slowly, but without resuming his song, he picked up his tools again and bent back to his work, cross-legged at the foot of the ancient tree. Even though he did not raise his head, after a few stretched-out minutes, in the corner of his vision he caught a glint of eyes in the darkness beyond the fire and he knew that he was observed.

“Come into the light,” he said slowly.

“You don’t need it to see me.” The voice was so familiar, so unbearably familiar.

“Nonetheless.”

After a moment there was motion among the trees, and the firelight fell on the figure of a solitary man, his feet bare and his hair unbound, wrapped in plain grey.  Finrod didn’t rise to greet him, but lifted his head and looked him up and down: the slender frame, the tension in his bearing, the features whose fineness bordered on delicacy.

“Curufinwë Atarinkë,” he said at last, giving each syllable of the name its full weight. “You look awful.”

There was nothing outwardly amiss: as with almost all of those who had returned from the Halls of Waiting, Curufin’s body was whole and sound. Indeed, re-shaped, his features had lost a little of the sharpness that they had taken on in Middle-Earth. Those last years in Nargothrond Finrod had seen their beauty honed away to mere sharp angles and biting edges, but now he thought he could once again see the resemblance to the father whose light Curufin had always reflected.

 _It must have gotten worse after he betrayed me,_ he thought, distant and almost dispassionate. _By the time he rode to the massacre at Doriath, I wonder I would have recognized him at all?_

But as he stood before him in the firelight Finrod could see Curufin’s spirit struggling within his new-formed body, as a creature brought out of darkness recoils at the touch of light on skin, on eyes. He had seen that struggle before, or something uncomfortably like it, in the spirits of those who were close to death; it was the look of a soul imperfectly tethered to the world.

“I thought you were dead, Curvo.”

“You _knew_ I was dead.” The voice should have been a rasp or a scrape, but it was the voice he knew: sweet and sharp-edged. “What you thought – I assume – is that I was going to stay there.”

It was true; if he were being honest he had not expected to find Feanor’s crafty son ever inclined to or capable of returning to the world at all. Even now, watching him as his spirit guttered and flared like an unsteady flame, it seemed hard to reconcile with either the best or the worst of the carefully controlled person he had known.

“I didn’t expect to see you at all,” he said, “and I certainly didn’t expect to see you like this. You look like you would really rather be dead.”

Curufin’s lips twitched briefly, a gesture towards a smile that did not make it all the way there. “And you, Findaráto, are as golden as always. Why, not even death has tarnished your sheen.”

It was the familiar manner he had adopted in Nargothrond, mocking and impeccable. Words of praise that curdled and stung on reflection. _Finrod the Wise, Finrod the Beloved, have you found it in your heart to have pity on us the Dispossessed, wicked as we are?_

Finrod’s passage through death had left him no patience with such veiled sneers. He put his tools aside and rose to his feet. “Do you think so?” he asked quietly. “Look into my eyes, Curufinwë, and tell me if I am the golden king you knew in Nargothrond.”

To his surprise – for he knew from experience how difficult the newly Returned could find contact with others – Curufin did meet his eyes. It seemed, for a moment, that they each saw the other reflected there: the light of their lost youth, the darkness of the Halls, the bitter knowledge of the self scoured and laid bare –

Curufin did not drop his gaze when he spoke at last. “I’m sorry.”

His cousin tried to take a step toward him, but his limbs, newly formed and answering to a soul not yet fully in command of its own life, did not bear him up. He swayed and nearly fell, and Finrod sprang forward to steady him. Curufin bared his teeth as if to snarl at the offered help, but caught himself, and composed his features into a smile that could almost have been called sweet. He took Finrod’s arm, his fingers tight, almost sharp, against his skin, and let him help him to sit down before the fire.

He who had been the King of Nargothrond stood looking down at the one who had betrayed him in a world lost long, long ago. Curufin looked back up at him, blinking as if he were looking into the sun. Finrod felt the unasked questions and the unanswered accusations surge in his blood and prickle on his skin; the broken-bone edges of friendship betrayed grating against each other. Suddenly unbearably tired, he sat down next to his cousin and picked up his tools for the third time.

He set to carving again, small curls of wood falling into his lap. There were dozens of wooden pegs that had to be cut and smoothed and shaped to precise measures, and it did help to have something do with his hands.

Curufin looked over at his work with a spark of real interest on his troubled face, but he suppressed the flare of curiosity as he tried to focus himself, to bring all of his unstable being to bear on the message that he had come to deliver.

He was readying himself to apologize – or whatever passed for an apology among Feanor’s proud children – that was plain enough. Finrod could almost hear the barbs that came so easily: _I’m sorry for speaking the truth where all of Nargothrond could hear it_. _I’m sorry you perished so pointlessly. I should have realized if you wanted to lead your people to torment and death, that was your prerogative, and theirs._ But when Curufin spoke, it was only to echo his former words.

“I am sorry.”

“Yes,” said Finrod after a moment. “Yes, I believe you are.”

Curufin spoke no more, only staring into the fire. Several times Finrod swallowed the beginning of an address to him, alternately angry, pleading, baffled.

 _Let it be done, go away, I never want to see you again_ and _don’t leave it there, tell me why you did it, what I could have done to stop it_ and _do you know what you did to us, what happened because of you?_

He finished the last of the wooden pegs and stood up, brushing the shavings into the fire. With a slight motion of his head, he indicated the direction where he had made his camp. Curufin looked up as he left and watched him go, but did not move.

 

When Finrod came back to the glade in the morning, carrying great coils of rope over his shoulder, he found him exactly where he had left him, sitting before the hollow where the fire had been, without any sign of having stirred body or limb in the slightest.

“You’re still acting like you’re dead, Curvo.” He rummaged in his pack and tossed him an apple, obliging him to move to catch it or be hit in the head. “You have a body now; you use it to move, to hunger, to thirst, to draw sustenance from your soul and sustain it in turn  –”

“Are you lessoning me in how living is done?” Curufin had caught the apple, but made no move to eat it.

“Well, you seem to be having some trouble with the mechanics of it.” Finrod sat down beside him and shuffled the heavy coils of rope off his shoulder. “That’s another thing I wouldn’t have expected; if you made it back to the world at all, I’d have thought it was because you couldn’t bear to be without activity a minute longer. What’s the line from the songs – _the call of my body and its skills 1 _?”

The reaction was unexpected. Across Curufin’s face, which still had all the helpless expressiveness of the newly Returned, flashed something that was unmistakably pain. It rose and receded; Finrod noted it with interest, and began to knot the ropes together.

“How if I told you, Curufinwë,” he said suddenly, resuming without warning the strange exchange of the previous night, “that you are not forgiven, that you betrayed me as your kin and you betrayed me as your king and you betrayed me as your host, and that if you were to crawl on your belly and lick the dust like the snake that you are, it would still be too high an honor for you – for beasts are innocent of treason –”

Curufin looked at him with studied mildness. “Well, I’d correct you on one point at least. You were no king of mine, cousin.”

“No,” he retorted, “nor of anyone, after you were through with me.”

His fingers fumbled among the knots.

“Some would call it unforgivable. What you did to us, Curufinwë. To my people. To me.”

Curufin was staring fixedly at his hands as they moved, as if glad to have somewhere to turn his eyes. “I know what happened to  –” His voice ran out, as if there were something physically difficult about uttering the evasion. That was another lingering habit of death, the inability to express anything other than the absolute truth. He drew a breath, spoke again. “I know what I did to you.”

“Do you?” Finrod pulled his hand out of the tangle of ropes and set it on his shoulder. The pressure was not hard, the gesture not violent, but he felt a shudder rippling through Curufin’s whole body.  He half-expected him to pull away, but he did not. Cool and expressionless he let his one-time friend confront him, and though Finrod heard a faint catch in his breathing, the overwhelming impression was one of relief. Curufin wanted the confrontation, wanted to hear whatever it was Finrod had been waiting to say to him, for the sake of some unfathomable scheme or still less fathomable penance.

Finrod found suddenly that he did not care about figuring out what Curufin meant by his presence. He was here, alive, he could hear him, and Finrod could have embraced him with gratitude if he weren’t so angry.

“Do you know what it was you did to us? Even in the grip of your Oath, would your smile have been quite so brilliant if you knew what it meant to fall into the hands of the Lord of Wolves? To have the ones who loved you and trusted you and looked to you to save them torn apart, _eaten,_ one by one, slowly, in the dark? To reach out to them and hear your own terror and shame echoing in their thoughts? To know your own body, your very self, reduced to meat?”

Curufin opened his mouth, shut it with a snap. He had always been so insistent on personal responsibility; Finrod remembered the screaming quarrel that had left his two brothers unwilling to speak to Feanor’s sons for centuries. _“Do you know what you did to us?” Angrod had shouted, calling up the horrors of the Helcaraxe. “Were we at your backs with whips?” Curufin had retorted. “You chose the passage of the Ice, cousin, and so did all who followed you.”_

Had death really changed him so much? Finrod pressed his luck. “There’s something viscerally horrifying about being eaten. Consumed. The teeth meeting in your  –”

“Unbelievable.” Curufin sounded more like himself than anything he had said yet. “ _Viscerally,_ Findaráto? Really?” The word was Taliska, meaning ‘of the intestines’; Finrod’s Quenya was peppered with such imports from Beleriand.  “You still do have the power to surprise me after all; I hadn’t thought you could possibly get any more tasteless.”

“Tasteless?” Finrod echoed and he heard Curufin hiss beside him.

“Findaráto, am I going to spend this entire conversation wondering whether you’re making cannibalism-related plays on words?”

Finrod smiled, as sweetly and innocently as he possibly could, showing all his teeth. “Eating, cousin, you do remember what that means?” He had still not touched the apple he had caught. “I mean, I assumed those ballads about the fall of Doriath were metaphorical, but maybe I was wrong. _Like winter wolves the seven circled  / Feanor’s sons with dripping jaws_ -“

Curufin glared at him, and bit, with great deliberation, into the fruit. The snap of the skin and the crunch of the sweet flesh were strangely audible in the morning air. Finrod laughed aloud and suddenly cast himself backward onto the forest floor, looking up at the distant tree canopy and the glimpses of sky through the leaves. For a moment it seemed they might be young again, on the other side of death, ranging through the forests of Aman on a hunting expedition, as if at any moment he might hear Celegorm’s soft footsteps over the leaves and feel Huan’s cold nose in his ear.

But Curufin did not join his laughter and after a moment Finrod sighed, returning in thought to Nargothrond and the last time he had seen his old friend’s face. Angry and pleading in the caverns by the workshops – _why would you do this to me, why would you make me do this to you?_ – and then in the throne room, calm, composed, smiling slightly as he set terror in the hearts of a people he despised, a people that had once called Finrod king.

“I realized later,” he said, looking at the sky rather than the gray-clad figure by the remnants of the fire, “you did try to warn me.”

“I tried to _hurt_ you,” Curufin put in sharply, “there’s a difference.”

“You succeeded very well, as I’m sure you know.” He rested against the leaves, feeling the cool contours of the ground beneath. “You told me to my face that you would betray me, but I didn’t listen... Do you know, it really was a surprise, in the end? I honestly didn’t think you would do it.”

“Findaráto, you’ve _met_ me. What do you know of me that suggested I would do anything else?”

“In hindsight, of course, it was perfectly obvious. I realized that, in Tol-in-Gaurhoth. A lot of things became clear to me, there in the night beneath the earth, imprisoned in the tower that I’d built. Naked in the darkness, with nothing but the voice and the laughter and the smell of carrion…”

“So why...” Curufin’s voice was very quiet. “Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Why did you trust me? You knew what I was. You’re not stupid. Was it really just that iron-plated optimism of yours, your famous _hope_? Did you hope that your own innocence was mighty enough to lift the shadow over even us?”

“Oh. I asked myself that, too, don’t think I didn’t! Repeatedly and bitterly and in several languages. I told myself that the men who trusted me died because I had trusted you and that semi-feral brother of yours– “

“Yes, I was giving you what’s called an opening. Get to the point. _Why did you do it_?” If he had not known Curufin so well, he would have thought that tone meant boredom.

No longer able to maintain his own air of relaxation, Finrod sat back up and looked him in the face. “I think – I wanted to see you as the same sort of thing I was. We were on the same side. We’d both made the same choice. And so I believed that you couldn’t betray us.  Couldn’t betray me. Not after what we’d both chosen in choosing to leave Aman. We were both Noldor, weren’t we? Friends. Cousins. Exiles. Kinslayers.”

That last stopped Curufin dead – or whatever the opposite expression was; in his shock he looked as alive as Finrod had yet seen him.

“I couldn’t have ever admitted it like that in Nargothrond, not even to myself. But there are no lies left when the wolf is waiting for you. We were both Kinslayers.”

“I suppose you forgot that being a Kinslayer means it’s your _kin_ that you slay?” Curufin’s voice was acid, but there was distress written in the sharp angles of his face. “Findaráto  –” He started to reach out, but stopped, and knotted his hands around each other.

Looking at him, Finrod could almost see the hundred biting things crowding just behind his lips. _I don’t suppose I’ll ever hear from you that you’re sorry for spitting in my face, for siding with a mortal over your own kin, for tripping off the oath that you knew,_ you knew, _was going to be the destruction of me and all my family?_

Curufin carefully untangled his long fingers and laid his hands flat on his knees. He drew a breath, and Finrod saw that his teeth were sunk into his lower lip, until there was no longer a distinction between a smile and a grimace of pain.

“I wronged you, Findaráto,” he said. “I miss you.” He closed his eyes. “I am sorry. And that is – that is all that I have come to say.”

The words were such effort he might as well have been chipping them out of stone. “I will – leave you now. If you wish it.”

There was silence between them for a long time, Finrod poised and sharp and evaluative, Curufin clinging to the silence as if to steady himself.

“Hold this, would you?” Finrod got to his feet, lifting the ropework in his arms, and passing one end to Curufin. “No, get up, and hold it out. There, don’t move. I just need to make sure that it’s coming out right.” He carefully unrolled the coils, walking backwards away from him, until he could see the meshwork pattern taking shape.

Finrod had looped his end around a tree and was walking up and down the net, murmuring to himself and checking the pattern against the design in his thought when Curufin finally spoke the words he had been waiting to hear.

“Findaráto, what on _earth_ are you doing?”

“Ah, I’m pleased you asked!” He was, and did not hide his pleasure. “You stay there, I’ll show you the plans.” He went around the other side of the tree and brought them back, long rolls of parchment waterproofed against outdoor work. “Oh, you can go ahead and set the net down. Look here!

“Turgon and I made a bet,” he added, craning over Curufin’s shoulder as he examined the careful, detailed drawings. “We weren’t going to go full city-scale this time, so this is a hanging garden, more or less –”

“Turukano? So I can expect to be tripping over _more_ Noldor kings and their building projects?” But Curufin was scanning the plans with light in his eyes. As Finrod had hoped, the mere sight had pulled him almost fully back to the world he was inhabiting with such difficulty. “Well I suppose it is a good thing you didn’t send me away after all, cousin; this may look very pretty on paper but I can tell you right now this here  –” he tapped a corner of the woven structure “is going to fall down the first time there’s a really high wind. Who drafted these plans? They aren’t plans, they’re – aspirations, you haven’t even included material notes for the platforms...”

“I built an entire underground city, Curvo,” said Finrod with some asperity. “I think I know what I’m doing.”

“The Dwarves of Narâg built an underground city that you moved into,” Curufin retorted, “you know slightly less about what you’re doing than a hermit crab knows about moving into a snail shell.”

“What, you won’t even give me credit for employing some fine engineers? As I recall you and your son built an illumination system for the inner courts that even Doriath might have envied. Those lights, Curvo! Like being inside a sunset, a sunrise, a hazy afternoon, a bright wind-torn night...” He smiled at the memory, and saw Curufin smiling too. There was less of vertigo in his manner now; he seemed more at home by the minute, even in the past.

“All right, you did have some worthy additions built to the city under the hill... But what is this?” He indicated on the sketch the delicate rope structures winding among the trees. “Why don’t you stick to what you do know? Or have you turned Nandorin since I saw you last? Don’t tell me – you live in the forest now and eat leaves like a deer.”

“I find I have lost my taste for being underground,” said Finrod mildly, and watched him wince.  “Besides, I’ve never tried to build something suspended; this was a perfect chance to experiment.”

“Of course you would pick a competition as your time to test out something new.” It was possible Curufin thought he was muttering; if so he was mistaken. “Is that why you’re out here alone? Will I disqualify you if I tell you that unless you add counterweights _here_ and _here_ these platforms are going to collapse?”

“Yes, how did you find me, anyway?” Already making alterations to the diagrams, Finrod ignored the question of disqualification.

Curufin laughed soundlessly, twitched the stylus out of his fingers, and corrected his correction. “Close your eyes, cousin, and tell me where to find the sun. You are the wrong that I have done; how could I not know where you are? Call it Doom, call it Fate, call it the price of being in the world... If I am to live, I must find you, offer you my repentance. I had forgotten how – how _clear_ Aman is, without the Shadow across it. I could have found you with my eyes closed. Of course,” he added with a sidelong glance at the light glinting off the intricately inlaid necklace Finrod was wearing, “that might be just your jewelry. Do you still never go anywhere without enough on your person to gild a medium-sized bell-tower?”

“It’s been useful to me,” Finrod said, twisting one of the rings on his fingers. His tone was even milder and his cousin’s wince even more pronounced than before.

“You will undoubtedly be gratified to know,” Curufin said after a minute. “that your nephew finally did hit me. Right in the face.”

“I have no doubt whatever that you deserved it.” Finrod rolled the plans shut again and set them against the truck. He turned back toward the camp and his store of supplies, indicating with his head that Curufin should follow him. This time he did.

“It was while you were – imprisoned.” The pause was hardly noticeable. “I told him how much I admired his strength of spirit, in refusing to mount an expedition to rescue you. I said that I knew from experience how deep the anguish of his heart must be. And would you believe, his eyes softened; he actually wanted the sympathy, even from me… And then I said ‘Of course, rescuing Maedhros didn’t in fact turn out to be impossible.’”

Finrod hissed between his teeth. “That’s low, Curufin, even for you.”

“The fact that you consider that a low for me suggests that even now you still haven’t quite grasped who I am.”

Finrod picked up another coil of ropes and considered for a minute before handing them to Curufin, who accepted them meekly enough; it was not a physical weakness that still occasionally rippled through him and left him blinking and swaying. He gathered a few tools into a pouch, but did not speak again until they had returned to the clearing. “I didn’t even think about it at the time, but I failed Orodreth. Well, wronged him at least. I left him with you. He didn’t deserve that.” He sat down beneath the tree again, holding out his hand for the ropes his cousin was carrying.

“He saved my life,” said Curufin after a moment, handing over the ropes and sitting down beside him. “For your sake. Well, to be strictly honest, he probably saved the lives of a half-dozen of Nargothrond’s dullest – I don’t think the high valor of the people of that city would have outlasted the beginnings of a real Kinslaying. Still, once your people learned that you were safely dead, they decided that you had been their king after all, and thought that Turko and I would make fitting grave-offerings for you. But your meek little nephew2 stood his ground and would not let things come to outright violence.

‘And thus your rescuers are repaid3!’ I said to him when he banished us. ‘Well, well, a life for a life, steward, though I hope restraining the fierce swords of Nargothrond proves easier than holding off the orc-hordes of Angband.’

‘My debt to you is paid already,’ he said. ‘A prince of Arafinwë’s line lies dead in Tol Sirion. No, this is a gift, for the sake of Finrod, who was brave and generous and who loved you ever.’ He didn’t quite have the nerve to say he thought that was the worst decision you’d made, but I did notice that he left off your usual epithet of ‘wise’.”

Finrod considered for a moment. He opened his hands and looked at the rings on his fingers flashing in the sunlight.

“There’s a Beorian story that Beren told me while we were in the dungeon,” he began.  “A hunter was traveling through a forest. It was winter, one of the winters that the folk of Dorthonion called _Morgoth’s Breath_. The Edain die in cold like that, their children starve... The only way to live through such a winter is to find shelter or keep moving, and so the hunter kept moving until he looked down and saw in his path a serpent, nearly frozen.

“The hunter was filled with pity to see another creature suffering so with the cold, so he picked the serpent up and placed it inside the furs that he was wearing, next to his own skin, and soon he felt it stir, he felt life coming back to it. And then he felt its fangs sinking into his flesh. And the snake said to the hunter, as he sank to the ice-hard ground. ‘Why did you do it? You’re not stupid. You knew what I was.’

Curufin said nothing.

“The thing is,” Finrod went on, reflectively, “I remembered that story from when Beor told to me it himself. But the language was different then, and the moral was different too. When the serpent kills the hunter, he’s killing himself. His only chance of shelter, of surviving the cold…”

“I suppose it all depends on whether you see yourself as a hunter, or as a snake.” There was rust at the edges of Curufin’s sharp voice.

“And from Barahir, I learned something that changed the story further. After Serech, when I gave him my ring in token of my blood-debt to him and his people, he looked at it in wonder. ‘Lord of the Elves and my Lord,’ he said to me, ‘do you know what this is?’

‘It is a device of my House in the West,’ I said. ‘Two serpents beneath a crown of flowers, one devours and one upholds.’ And I might have gone into the whole story of why my father chose that as an image, but Barahir was already speaking again. He told me that for his people the snake was sacred, a protector. How a household would venerate what they called the House Serpent, and would leave out offerings of bread and milk for it.”

“Just to be sure I understand you,” said Curufin, after he had evidently satisfied himself that Finrod had no more to say on the subject, “you’re using this whole rambling sequence – of how a simple fable about inherent wickedness turned out to be part of a much larger tradition – as a metaphor for the complexity of our relationship?” He started to tell off the points on his fingers.  “That although what I did to you might appear to be a simple betrayal and your trust in me foolish, in fact I hurt myself in hurting you. That though I was an inherently dangerous creature I was still – no, no, I’ll figure it out in a second – that I was still an agent of preservation.  And, if I’m still following you, finally you’re saying that in the emblem of your house I am both the serpent that upholds _and_ the serpent that devours. I suppose that would make you the flower crown. Which seems appropriate enough.”

Finrod smiled brightly. “Well yes, more or less, though I was going to let the point gracefully make itself.”

“Yes, I noticed, which was why I spelled it out for you. Your faith in the clarity of your meaning is like your faith in – well, most things. Touching, but not at all justified.”

“Oh, Curvo! How I have missed you!” Finrod was about to fling an arm around his shoulder, but reconsidered at the last moment. “I do love your relentlessly analytical nature, you know. There’s something so touchingly _thorough_ about the way you approach conversation. Like a borer beetle eating its way through a table leg.”

“First a wolf, then a snake, then a termite,” said Curufin dryly. “I have become a whole bestiary. Is this the new fashion in poetry these days, cousin?”

“No, the new fashion in poetry is for the minimal, actually. A word, a silence for a very specific time, another word... Vanyar-driven, of course; but then it would be.”

Curufin looked at the rings on his hands, then hard into his eyes. “Amarie? So she did forgive you in the end.” He laughed to himself, hardly making a sound. “Well, everyone does, after all. I’ve never quite figured out what it was that made you so universally beloved, but clearly not even the Valar held your deeds against you. Why, your eyes must have barely had time to adjust to the Halls before you came back singing into the sunlit world. You were singing, weren’t you? Don’t tell me.”

“Curufinwë. Is that really what you think? That it was because I was – exceptionally _good_ that I returned to the world?”

His cousin looked startled at his reaction. Finrod pressed on.

“I know your opinion of yourself, cousin, and I’m sure you are indeed a terribly wicked person, but surely you don’t think what happened to us in Tol Sirion was because of _you_?”

“I...” Curufin might as well have been reciting Vanyarin poetry; he sank to a silence that seemed unlikely to be broken.

“Your trustworthiness wasn’t the only thing that I’d tried to have both ways. That was something else I realized in the dungeons; there’s something about waiting to be eaten by wolves that clears your mind terribly.”

“Oh, were you eaten by wolves?” Curufin’s voice always took on a particular sweet bell-like clarity when he was being sarcastic, a habit that death did not seem to have affected. “I can’t believe that slipped my mind, you’d better remind me again.”

Finrod ignored this and went straight on, his voice light as it always was when speaking of the matters of most serious import. “I realized – you were right.”

Curufin looked up at him. “Are you trying to make me feel better?”

“It’s the truth. If it makes you feel better, that’s merely an unfortunate side-effect. You told me that I didn’t know what I would be leading my people into, in making assault on the Lord of Fetters, and you were right. Not that I thought we’d win; Nolofinwë himself only scratched the Enemy. But I never thought – Tol Sirion…”

He gathered himself; it was no easier to say for having known the truth of it for so long. “Curufinwë, when I lifted up my voice against the Lord of Wolves _, I didn’t think I would lose._ ”

There was a space in the air where a peal of laughter should have been. “You always did think well of your singing, but surely you knew that the greatest sorcerer in Arda would be harder to impress than a bunch of mortals huddled around a fire.”

“I was on my own ground, in the tower I had built. It was my song in the very stones of the place. But the real reason I thought that my song would prevail over his…” It was his turn to drop his eyes. “You’ll laugh.”

“I’ll try very hard not to.”

“ _Goodness_.”

“You’re right,” Curufin said. “I’m laughing.”

He was not.

“Maia though he was, I had everything that he had lost. All the strength and beauty and goodness that he and his master could never overwhelm. I had _Aman_.” Finrod could no longer rest on the forest floor, charged with agitation he got up and began pacing back and forth.

“Do you know  –” he turned suddenly to his cousin where he sat curled into himself, “right up to the moment when he invoked the Kinslaying, I believed I was innocent?”

“I noticed,” said Curufin dryly. He had chaffed him about that innocence in Nargothrond – _Why Findaráto – excuse me,_ Finrod _, I would not slander you with a murderer’s name – do you mean by sheer force of Hope to lift the Doom upon the Noldor?_

“It shouldn’t have worked, him bringing Alqualonde into the Song. That blood wasn’t on my hands. But if that were true, it _wouldn’t_ have worked.  And it did.

“There I was, building a song of power as I had never made before, and even in that place of terror, even knowing how much was at stake, there was such a joy in it. The arguments that I’d made against the Dark to my own people, to be able to make them to the Enemy’s face! I even believed – I was meant to be there.  Perhaps it was for this moment that everything had happened, even your treachery. Perhaps this was the goodness to be drawn out of that evil: to bring me, in the full strength of the Light, against the sorceries of the Dark.

“And it was working, Curufinwë, I was _winning_ – he bent his will against me, to break and pierce and overpower, and he could not gain the mastery. I called upon the strength of oaths kept, the strength that bound me and my people together. I summoned the magic and might of Aman that he could never see again, the power and beauty of the boundless sea. And then he turned to me, and he smiled, for all the world like _you_ – ‘Oh, you mean that sea where you spilled the blood of your kin?’

“And I – didn’t have an answer. Alqualonde ran through our presence on those shores like a fault-line through rock. No matter how strong, how good, how noble any of us were, none of us would be there without the fact that we were willing to murder and steal to get there. It was over. I couldn’t hide myself from him; my power couldn’t shield my people any more. I’d staked everything on an innocence I didn’t have.”

Curufin was watching him soberly. “If it helps, you were less infuriating about your innocence than your brothers were,” he offered.

Finrod shaded his eyes with his hand. “Perhaps. But I would have – chosen other circumstances to learn I was wrong.”  

“You know,” said Curufin after a moment, “I thought this would be more satisfying.”

“What? Me admitting I was wrong? I’m sure you have a number of speeches for the occasion, cousin-Kinslayer. Go ahead. Enjoy yourself.”

“I’m not going to insult you by asking you to believe me, but I find that I don’t actually – want to make them anymore.” He stared fixedly ahead.

“No? But you must – this is why – if I can’t rely on you to speak the truth  –”

He was astonishing himself. He set his hand against the tree and spoke more calmly.

“Do you know how many people have tried to tell me that I was innocent? That I died unjustly, because of a guilt that wasn’t even my own, betrayed twice over by the Feanorians? But you know better, Curvo, you know your guilt can’t make me clean.”

Curufin seemed almost as surprised as he was himself to hear those words. Moving slowly, as if he could not quite remember how his limbs worked, he got to his feet. Finrod stared at him mutely, hoping for something that he could not name, judgement and repentance at once.

“Can you climb, wearing that?” He nodded at Finrod’s clothing. It was an outdoor style in cut, but stiff with embroidery and precious stones. “I’ll help you set the scaffold ropes. What you’re doing there will be far easier if you weave it in place.”

“I – of course.” In one liquid motion Finrod shrugged off the outer robe, showing the lighter clothing beneath it. “But you? The robes of the Returned are hardly conducive to  –”

Curufin gave him one unreadable look, knotted one end of the thickest grade of rope around his waist, and began to scale the largest of the trees. He moved slowly, but steadily, finding holds for fingers and toes in the ancient bark. After gaping at him for a moment, Finrod took the other end of the coil and sprang up the next tree in the line. When they reached their first respective branches, they turned toward each other.

“One scaffold line here. One above. Pull in your side. There.” Curufin untied the rope from his waist and re-knotted it around the base of the first massive branch.

After they had set the scaffold lines, Curufin made no move to go back down to bring up more rope, and was sitting on a branch, leaning against the trunk, when Finrod walked across a newly-secured rope to join him.

“We’ll want these down eventually, of course,” he said, looking back over the ropes that joined the two trees. They looked thin as a spider’s web against the massive trunks; the air was already cooler away from the forest floor. “They really will snap if the trees sway in a storm.”

“Yes. No. This is only for support while we’re building.” Curufin’s face was alarmingly gray; Finrod rummaged at his side for the water-pouch. “It was actually a good design; good principles. The whole structure – flexible. It just – correction on a few points  –”

Finrod pressed the leather bottle into his hands. “Drink, for goodness sake, cousin. Have you had anything to drink since leaving the Halls? I’m not having you fall out of this tree.”

Curufin looked blankly at the water-pouch.

“Water? You do remember it? It’s wet, it sustains life, the oceans are made out of it, it still echoes with the primordial Music from which we all take our being-“ He did not stop until he saw Curufin drinking and glaring at him as he drank.

“What you were saying, cousin...” he began after a minute, closing his eyes and leaning his head back against the trunk. He was still having difficulty speaking, but his voice seemed stronger for the refreshment. “I didn’t come here to be right. I gave that up, I had to give that up, to come back. And so you learned at last that you were one of the Kinslayers after all? What do you want me to say?  All the words I have are old and bitter. You intolerable creature, your whole life was your song; you were the friend to every kindred, the merry prince beneath the hill, holding the Doom of the Noldor at bay with the sheer force of your innocence. I mocked you for it, but I – I wanted to believe it too.”

Finrod opened his lips to laugh, but the sound that came out was closer to a cry. “You were right, Curvo, Sauron was right, and I gave my people into his hand because I didn’t realize that in time. He would never have won, his wolves would never have gorged themselves on the living flesh of the men who trusted me, if he hadn’t been right. Alqualonde _was_ on my hands, even though I’d never shed a drop of blood. I didn’t know how, not at first, but there was plenty of time to learn...”

“It was there in the dark, you know,” he added suddenly, “when my mind was my own, anyway, that I finally forgave my father for turning back at Araman and begging for pardon. You know the words we spoke to each other over that – words that should never pass between a father and a son.”

There was a sudden movement beside him, quickly suppressed.

“But I couldn’t bear it, the look in my father’s eyes, the guilt… What was he guilty of? What did he think we needed to be forgiven for? What was so terrible in what we had done that he would no longer associate with us? We hadn’t slain anyone!”

“No,” Curufin put in, “that was all us.”

“Exactly, Curufinwë. That was all you. But did we forsake you after what you did at Alqualonde? Did we say _freedom is not worth this price; let us bury our brothers, we will find some other way to Middle-Earth?_ We railed against you, but we were willing to take those ships. You were the Kinslayers, but we were willing to profit from the Kinslaying.”

He looked sidelong at his companion. “Even if we never did enjoy that profit, in the end, thanks to your little beach party at Losgar.”

“There,” returned Curufin, with something like his old spirit. “You may thank me for preserving your soul unstained.”

“That fire in the distance, Curvo.” Finrod stared at the small homely fire before them. “So small, so far, it was like a new and terrible star red and low on the horizon. The Traitors’ Star, we called it, but it faded so fast... Had we really left our kin unburied by the shore for this? Damned ourselves, with not even a ship to show for it? We couldn’t say that, of course, which made the anger all the worse. Oh, I hated you then, Curvo. I would have crossed the Ice, alone if I had to, just to punch you and every one of your brothers in your smug smiling faces  –”

“I couldn’t do any such thing, of course. Father’s people were my people now; the ones who hadn’t turned back with him. Suddenly, there I was, leader of the House of Arafinwë In Exile –”

“But that was what you joined our revolt for, surely,” said Curufin, “something something unguarded lands and realms to rule at your own will?” He was shaping his voice into something very close to Finrod’s own Telerin-inflected accents, but suddenly his voice faded and he fell into a fit of coughing.

“I still haven’t ruled out that punch in the face, Curvo,” said Finrod. Even now, in the endless summer of the Blessed Realm, in a body remade, the memory of the crossing of the ice chilled him from the spirit outwards. “What was the final verdict, in the songs? ‘Great was the hardihood of that host in those days?’”

“' _The fire of their hearts was young_.’” It was one of Maglor’s lines, the cadence was unmistakeable.

“Yes, well, that’s one way to put it, I suppose. It was more like a host that had only recently learned fear, and still wasn’t very good at it. Oh, we got good at it, by the end...”

There was a soft sigh at his side. “Do you remember?” said Curufin quietly. “Aman, before? Can you believe we thought we knew what it was to be afraid?”

“We had no idea what it meant to lose something. To watch the world get smaller and smaller and blacker and blacker, as one by one your choices get taken away...”

“Are you still talking about the Ice?”

“I’m talking about all of it, Curvo. Everything.  Maybe that was the song I should have sung to Gorthaur. How we betrayed our kin on the near shore, and then our kin betrayed us on the far shore, and how we kept going anyway, all of us, because we are Eldar and we are for the world, and we cannot be sundered from it wholly or finally, not by darkness or cold, not by fear or doubt or grief  –”

The old resonance was thrumming through his voice, he felt the answering song from the earth below him and the air around him, it moved with the motion of the sap in the ancient trees and the blood in the new-made veins of his old friend at his side.

Something nudged at his hand. Curufin was passing him the water bottle. “You need this as much as I do, cousin. Well, frankly it seems you need something stronger, but as you don’t appear to have come fully prepared –”

He laughed, and drank; the water was cold against his teeth.

 

 

Over the next several days the rough outlines of the structure among the trees began to take shape. The full project would be the work of years, relying on the growth of moss and vine, until the gardens would appear as something that had sprung from the trees rather than been built there, like an impossible word spoken by the forest itself.

Curufin worked beside him, and Finrod thought, privately, that the work seemed to do him good. His spirit was still distressingly unstable – on more than one occasion Finrod had had to restrain himself from simply grasping him by the shoulders and attempting to sing him fully back into the world – but there seemed to be some improvement; he ate and drank, and on one occasion he even slept. Finrod never saw him smile, however.

The first rough bases of the suspended terraces were complete, and the two of them were sitting on the lowest, Finrod idly flicking leaves off the platform and watching them spin to the forest floor below.

They were speaking of neutral matters, if anything between them could truly be called neutral. There was still a wariness about him – no, not wariness, Finrod corrected himself, that word was an attempt to map Curufin’s behavior onto that of an animal. It was not wariness straining to approach, but incompleteness straining after fulfillment.

In his contemplation of what ailed his cousin, he had lost the thread of what he was saying, and returned to the present to find that Curufin had evidently been doing the same as he: studying him, contemplating the missing pieces.

“No children, Findaráto? Even after all this time?”

Finrod turned to him, his lips tight. “Do _you_ ask me that, cousin?”

Curufin stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“I – you know, of all people, you know how I failed. I was the King of Nargothrond, and I let my people’s courage break to you. I was the Lord of my faithful Ten, and I led them to torment and death in the tower that I had built. I was oath-bound to Beren, and I failed even him in the end; I died believing that I left him utterly alone in Gorthaur’s clutches. What kind of father would I be, who could not be a king?”

“So you weren’t talking about –”

But Finrod was contemplating the rings on his fingers. “I wonder where it is now?” he said softly. “The ring, my pledge to Barahir... They might have recovered it from Sauron’s treasure-hoard after Luthien pulled the tower down. It grieved Beren sorely to lose it, but they stripped us of everything before they put us into the pit.”

He raised his eyes to Curufin again. “Everything but each other. He meant it for a torment of its own – that each of us might feel the others die. That knowing what we were, what awaited us, we’d break more easily.

“He left me for last as they were binding us. He guessed I was some sort of leader, and anyway I couldn’t have gotten up from the floor. The orcs were swarming about me, their horrible hands –

“He came and sat down beside me, on the steps of the throne. The floor was crusted with filth, but he didn’t mind; none of it seemed to touch him. ‘You are a traitor already,’ he said to me, looking over Alqualonde burning where he had plucked it out of my thoughts as easily as I might take that twig from your hands. ‘There is no need for you to be a dead traitor. Serve me and live, Noldo.’ His voice was sweet and rich; it was full of flames and – and laughter. He ran his hand over my hair, and it was worse than the claws of the orcs. Later I realized he must have been puzzled by the color.

‘Well. You shall become one of my servants, one way or another. I think being a meal for my wolves would be a pointless waste of your obvious talents, but you’re free to disagree.’

He came to me often at first, sometimes in one shape, sometimes in another, sometimes in no shape at all, and then I could not tell whether he was truly there, or whether it was my own thought speaking to me in Sauron’s voice. He hadn’t undone all of my art, only the parts that I’d already conceded to him, like the Kinslaying. We still had the strength of our oaths kept, and that power had not been broken. I was holding all of our names and so he could not pry them out of us by force, though he – tried.

“It didn’t take him long to realize that, though, and once he did, he laughed and laughed. ‘What a waste of effort, Noldo! You’re going to a great deal of trouble to conceal something I’m going to learn anyway. I only need one of you, and I’ll leave it up to you which one that shall be.’ It was an impossible position for us, and he knew it. The last one left would be the leader, the important one, the one that we were all protecting. So he sent in his wolves.

“The eyes were wrong. The eyes were wrong. They were  –” He broke off.  “To this day I don’t know whether it was just one of Sauron’s illusions, to show us the eyes of our own people in the wolves that came to devour us. But he never lied where truth would serve his purposes better. And those were not merely animals. Each one was a promise, an offer, and they laughed as they fed. _You are less than men already. Less than beasts, for beasts can flee. Serve me and live._ Was it the wolf that spoke in our minds, or Sauron, or our own fear?”

There was another stifled sound from Curufin; he seemed to be in real distress. Finrod felt no inclination to spare him the knowledge of what had happened, any more than he spared himself.

“If I’d been alone, you know,” he went on, his voice hardening, “I would have broken. I might be one of Sauron’s creatures now… If I hadn’t had the Ten, I would have lost myself entirely.

“And there were moments – more than moments – where I did lose myself. To the terror and the pain and the darkness, the failure and the loss. But they were there to remember who I was. Their need for me, their faith in me, told me who I had to be for them… It was a better person than who I really am.

“Isn’t that strange?”The afternoon sun was beginning to catch the undersides of the leaves around them; the memory of the darkness could not touch it after all. “I had tried to cast the crown aside, after you broke my lordship, but they needed the King of Nargothrond. And so that was who I was. Holding us all together. Being with them in the darkness. Doing what I could to ease their pain, to sustain their courage. Giving them back their names as they died, one by one. Reminding them they were men and Eldar and my beloved companions, rather than pieces of meat, despite the rather persuasive arguments of Sauron’s wolves to the contrary.”

He sighed heavily. “No, but I am glad you are here, so I can say this to you. Not just so you can know what happened – you can’t know, not really – but because you can see the guilt. Because I owe you nothing and, well, I don’t have to face your forgiveness. The Ten, my people, the ones who followed me to the end, I failed them so completely, and they still forgave me and upheld me and died in loyalty to a kingship that only existed because of their faith  –”

He suddenly looked over at his companion. “Curvo – you’re crying.”

Curufin raised his head; his face was wet with tears but his voice was as sharp as ever. “You probably didn’t have occasion to wonder about this, cousin, since you apparently treated the Halls of Mandos as one of your overnight camping excursions, but – do you know why I couldn’t return to the world?”

“Besides the obvious?” said Finrod lightly, trusting that this was not in fact a change of subject. “The treason and murder and the unrepentant blood-guilt?”

“I didn’t – know how. I didn’t know whose life I would be taking up, if I returned to life again. The person I had been – that wasn’t someone I recognized. No, that’s not right. I knew that person well enough. But that wasn’t someone worth bringing back to the world. That was hardly a person at all.”

He shook himself. “But what you did for your people – I would have given anything, Findaráto, _anything_ , to be able to do that for my son.”

“Your – son?” Finrod sat up straight. Celebrimbor in his halls had been quiet and courteous and skilled; for the most part in his father’s shadow. Only much later had he learned what steel was hidden beneath that restrained manner. “I knew you had quarreled, when – well, after I died; I heard nothing more of him in the deeds of the War of the Jewels.” Distress crept into his voice. “I thought that he might have escaped your family’s doom.”

“He did. He did.”  Curufin’s voice was now little more than a whisper.

“But I saw Nargothrond’s fall, as the Weaver showed it; he – oh Curvo, not Angband?”

Curufin gave a quick motion of the head, the gesture _no,_ or perhaps _wait._ Finrod did reach out to him then, and Curufin did not shrink back from the arm around his shoulders. He was shaking; the anguish of his newly rehoused spirit barely dampened by the stability of the flesh.

“No. Not Angband. He outlived Morgoth, outlived Beleriand – Finrod, he outlived the world we had broken, and he lifted up his hands to make it anew. He became so much. More than I had ever been. But – he wasn’t the only one who escaped the wreckage of the First Age.”

“Curvo, _what happened_?”

If his words of repentance might have been chipped out of stone, these were clawed out with broken nails and bloodied fingertips. “Sauron. He came to my son. He spoke fair words, he wore a fair form. Together, they  –” He choked on the words.

Finrod had been content enough to watch Curufin twisting before him when he was attempting to reckon with his own betrayal, facing up to the horrors that he had called down. But to see him exposed like this, in the grip of a pain that he could neither control nor conceal, felt wrong. He would rather the knife-edge in his old friend’s voice than the open wound.

“He trusted him. He –”

“Curvo  –”

“I saw it. I saw everything. Findaráto, I – I know exactly what it is to see someone you love in the hands of Gorthaur the Cruel. He did not even know his own name, by the end. I could not save him. I could not spare him. I could offer him neither courage nor comfort. I could do nothing for him in his death. But afterwards...”

Finrod felt the shaking ease under his hand.

“What you said, about Tol Sirion-“ Curufin gathered himself. “If you were no king in the end, I was still less of a father. I had lost myself a long time ago. But I could be with him in the darkness, in Namo’s silent halls, and his need for me called me back to myself. He needed me to remember who he was.  To remember who I was. He needed his father.” He looked over at Finrod from under the fall of his hair across his face. “You’re right, Findaráto, the person that he needed was a better one than I was.

“That’s why I am here now, if you want to know,” he added. He turned suddenly, and the platform swayed beneath them. “What was it you said to me – _you look like you would rather be dead?_ I would certainly be more _comfortable_ in Death, without having to share the world with people like you. But my child, my son, he felt the world and the body calling him again.

“I do not know how it was that he found healing so quickly, but he rose up and bade me farewell and walked out of Mandos. He parted from me in love and not in anger this time, but I think that even then he did not realize what I would do for his sake. I did what I had to do to return to life in the world; I am doing it now. I will repent what I must repent, forgive what I must forgive, there is no grievance I will cling to and no – no pride I will not forsake, but I will never abandon him again.”

Finrod sat stricken, re-evaluating everything that he had said to him.

“Your son and... Osse’s teeth, Curvo, why didn’t you tell me that from the beginning? I wouldn’t have been giving you such a hard time!”

Curufin shook away from the hand on his shoulder. “Why do you think I didn’t lead with that? What happened to my son doesn’t excuse what I did to you. You are too soft-hearted for your own good or anyone else’s, Felagund.”

“That – that certainly explains why you were stumbling around the woods of Valinor as blind and mazed as a new-molted crab.”

Curufin twitched his head, clearly reaching for a dismissive shrug, but falling short into something more like a shudder.

“You know, I’d spent a good deal of time working out what I was going to say to you, if I ever saw you again,” he said, trying to nudge Curufin back into his customary manner. “I see what you mean about being less satisfying that you’d hoped; I think I’d actually rather you be your prickly hard-shelled self.”

The proffered sympathy had the effect he hoped for. Curufin pressed a corner of his robes briefly against his eyes and glared. “Your faith in my resilience, Finrod, is as touching and as  –”

“Misplaced as my faith in everything else, yes, you’ve said that once already, or have you forgotten?”

Now there were real sparks in his eyes. “Since you’ve been so impressively inventive with your zoological metaphors, I thought that somebody needed to maintain a little consistency in this exchange.”

Finrod paused, evaluating whether he should continue goading him into responsiveness, or whether he could begin to ask the questions that were thronging in his mind. It would be no good to ask what on earth had happened to deliver Celebrimbor into Sauron’s hand; Curufin was not so firmly established in the world of the living that Finrod could trust him not to fall apart altogether at the attempt to answer.

“So you returned for your son’s sake...” he said at last, trying to keep his tone balanced on the edge of compassion. “But he’s not – you’re not with him now?”

“No, he is with his mother at the foot of the mountains. I’m not going to drag him along with me while I do what I must in order to be reconciled to the world. Besides,” he added, baring his teeth, “it’s not as if _he_ has any reason to sue for mercy at your feet.”  

“Oh, is _that_ what you’re doing?” Finrod looked at his feet; they dangled over empty air above the forest floor. He pressed on, laughing; Curufin was probably too distressed to be able to tell it was forced. “So you only came to me so you can return to the world with your son. Should I be insulted? I thought you had come to offer me your repentance because you realized what you had done to me was wrong.”

“Come off it, Finrod. Of course what I did to you was wrong. I knew it at the time; you knew I knew it; that didn’t stop me.”

The woods were quiet around them.

“What would you have had me do?” Finrod asked him softly. “In Nargothrond.”

Curufin looked at him in sudden surprise. “Are you really asking me that?”

“Yes. I am. And I should stipulate: yes, oaths made to mortals count, and no, you can’t use knowledge we gained later, such as the fact that Beren’s lady grew into the full might of one of the Powers walking on the earth. What should I have done, Curvo, when my oath came for me and summoned me into the darkness?”

He felt a great storm of arguments gathering from his old friend; he knew them for the ones that he had gone over himself in the dungeons of Tol-in-Gaurhoth. _Throw your diplomatic weight against Thingol of Doriath, persuade Beren to wait for an assault on Morgoth with the joined forces of all the Eldar in Middle-Earth –_ He had evaluated each of them himself, running frantically down the branching paths of might-have-beens, until he realized that his people needed him there, with them, mistakes and all.

At last Curufin spoke. “Not die.”

“What?”

“You asked me what I wanted you to do. I wanted you _not to die,_ Finrod. If one of us could have escaped it should have been you.”

Finrod made no answer at first. Then, in one smooth motion, he got to his feet on the edge of the platform. A few leaves drifted from where he had disturbed them, and were lost, spinning downward to the forest floor.

“Stand up, Curufinwë.”

Curufin blinked up at him.

“Do you think I’m going to knock you off this platform? Stand up.” Without waiting for him to remember how to do it on his own, Finrod stooped, took both his hands in his, and pulled him to his feet.

“Findaráto, what are you  –”

He wrapped his arms around him, pulling him tightly into an embrace. There were a few stifled snappish noises from Curufin, and a sort of trembling rigidity that ran all through his body, but Finrod ignored it.

“There, Curufinwë; the Dead cannot embrace. You came for reconciliation, you can’t flinch away when you actually get it,” he said into his ear.

The noise that Curufin made was somewhere between a hiss and a sneer, but he did not pull away. After a moment he raised his arms and returned the embrace, with an awkwardness that was almost painful in someone normally so graceful.

“I’m sure it’s not very comfortable for a frozen serpent to thaw out either, but I don’t care, Curufinwë, you’re here, you’re _alive_ –”

“Are you awarding yourself points for every animal reference in this conversation?” Curufin’s voice was muffled against his shoulder; he could feel the warmth of his breath. “I can’t decide whether this is better or worse than your cannibalism tally.”

In the end, it was Finrod who broke their embrace, setting his hands on Curufin’s shoulders and pushing him away slightly so he could look him in the face.

“And now, Curvo, for all love, go to your son! If the only reason you’re not with him is because you feel obliged to reconcile with me, then consider that – dealt with.”

“Well.” Curufin was almost demure, if not for the ice in his tone. “You aren’t exactly the only person with something against me, Finrod, hard as that may be to believe.”

“I’d better come with you then.” Finrod did not let go of his shoulders. “After all, as you noted, everyone loves me. They may just hear you out, if I’m with you.” He tossed his hair back over his shoulders in a gesture that he knew caught the diffuse afternoon light in a particularly appealing manner.

Curufin snorted. Then, something catching his attention, he reached up and touched the spot on Finrod’s neck just below his ear.

“Really, Finrod. _Really_?”

Finrod could not help laughing at the expression on his face as he examined the wolfs-head tattoo. “Yes, we all got them! The Ten and I, I mean, when we returned to the world. It started with young Danion – Nandorin, you know; they tattoo themselves for particularly significant events and it doesn’t get much more significant than what happened to us all in the darkness. So then we had him tattoo each of us, and not everyone was as tasteful as I was, either. Hithaereg’s design covers his entire chest, and I’m not even going to tell you where Edhrahil’s is.” He reached up and traced the raised lines affectionately with a finger. “Scandalized my father, of course, but really, what was he going to say about it?”

The descent from the trees was more graceful now, woven ladders unfurling and light steps opening at the pressure of a foot. Curufin paused at the roots of the tree.

“Are you really – you don’t have to come with me, you know.”

“Look what happened last time I left you alone,” returned Finrod blithely. “Besides, a rest won’t do this project any harm. Let the vines grow. I’m sure Turgon will consider me disqualified on a technicality anyway. And we can come back in a few years. Bring your son!” He paused. “I – may do the same.”

“Didn’t you just say you had no children?”

“No, no children. But now, perhaps...” He tossed his head, the light glinting and flashing among the gold. “Now, perhaps...”  
  


**Author's Note:**

> 1: This is how Miriel is described in the extended discussion of her case in Morgoth’s Ring.  
> 2: Following the version of the story in which Orodreth is Angrod’s son, not Finarfin’s.  
> 3: Following the version of the story in which Curufin and Celegorm rescue Orodreth and his people from the fall of Tol Sirion.


End file.
